Greenlight: Crowdsourcing comes to Steam

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Greenlight lets you feel better about exploring and experimenting, and gives you just as much upfront data about what you’re doing. You can what your friends on Steam or voting for, which is hugely helpful for steering you in the right direction. And if you just want to browse, you can easily do that, too — that’s more challenging in the actual Steam Store.

There is, however, one major problem right now. Although Greenlight is apparently incredibly popular (with 2.3 million votes were reportedly cast the first day alone), as of this writing it’s been, uh, lit for less than a week, and no games have yet been accepted. Until some are, it will be difficult to get a really good grasp on how — or, perhaps, if — things work as Valve intended.

But of the nearly 700 games that have already been submitted for consideration, some look to me like they could have real promise. Some of the more intriguing I unearthed include:

You can also find side-scrolling platformers, old-school shooters, 8-bit retro-kitsch diversions, puzzle games, even text adventures! Just browsing through the “stacks,” I was astonished at the diversity on offer. Granted, some of the games appeared mighty amateurish, and I’ll be shocked if some of the ones I skimmed past have a long life (or any at all). But the clear majority have apparently received a tremendous amount of time, work, and even love — and in a number of cases looked as good as, or even superior to, than what you see from more established designers and studios.

Will any of these games make the big time? Who knows? But they’re getting the chance at an airing most of them have never had before, and one their creators probably thought they never would have. If even just a couple of truly memorable games come out of Greenlight, it will have been worth it — and with this many submissions already, and far more still to come in the weeks and months ahead, chances are good we’ll get quite a few more than that. And because games don’t disappear unless they’re accepted or removed by their developers, one that doesn’t catch fire today just might tomorrow.

All this makes Greenlight fascinating as not just a game discovery system and a social experiment, but also an expression of American values. Don’t care for the games Valve employees have decided on? Vote for ones you do like. Think you can do better yourself? Prove it, and let the people decide if you’re right. Either way, everyone benefits and Steam gets just a bit hotter — and a lot more fun.

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There are a lot of really good looking games on Green Light, its not just “Angry Bird Clones” and “Shovelware”. If you had taken more then two second to looks you would have seen this. Also to point out the fact that many of those games will not make it because the users have to vote for them. I read a lot of the comments on the games posted and the users are really critical so I doubt we will be seeing many bad games coming to Steam. Overall I am very excited to see this on Steam many of the games I have already downloaded and tried before waiting for them to come to steam.

They’re making efforts to cut down on the crapware and make it easier to find games you wanna rate. I think it’s pretty cool that they’re only a week in and already they’re making major, relevant changes. Valve is a pretty great company, I think they’ll work out the kinks and we’ll end up seeing a really great platform come out of this.

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